Darker, Deeper, Dexter
by goddessa39
Summary: 10 random Drabbles in the Dex-verse, what might have been and might well be. Can be AU, Het, spoiler!alert, fluff, Adult!rating, or more... Dex/Rita.


**Darker, Deeper, Dexter**

_10 random Drabbles in the Dex-verse_, what might have been and might well be.

Dexter is not mine, though I wish it was 'cuz I'd be rich.

Dexter/Rita pairings with some Dexter-Deb mentions, maybe.

Can be AU, Het, spoiler!alert, fluff, Adult!rating, or more…

Note: OMG! I just read some spoilers and Rita is dead. OMG! I did not expect that. To be sure she was a bitch in the beginning but she's also integral to understanding the coming humanity of Dexter. I don't like it. (I also heard some bashing on the whole "It's a dream!" idea and while I don't believe it I too hope it's true.) So these drabbles are mostly inspired by that scene but there are others.

**-1-**

Positive. That's what he feels. Oh, there isn't light-or light at the end of the tunnel.

Dexter doesn't really think there is an afterlife, but if there is he knows that he is reserved for hell. Honestly, he doesn't let that thought bother him though because he is a killer and if he makes it to hell he'll just probably turn into another demon, hell bent on causing pain to the bad.

The car speeds cross the open road and no one else is around. It feels strange but Dexter is so light headed it doesn't bother him overly much. In no time he is walking in sunshine it seems, opening the car door, stepping at and closing it behind him. There is light in him now, burning brightly. He thinks that maybe he can do this, maybe he can live a man's normal life with a wife and kids (it doesn't matter if only one is his) and not have to pass on the job of killing the unjust because the creature inside him calls for blood.

Maybe, just maybe he can…

And then he is inside, walking forward. And why is there crying-Rita was always good at quieting the baby and their son was never much of a crier.

And there he is. Harrison. His heart pumps up and he thinks it is the love crawling over him once again but his nose twitches and his eyes sharpen and the glowing corners of his new world begin to fade.

Because

there is his son

and he is

covered in

blood.

_Blood._

_Blood._

_Blood._

It pumps in him and suddenly…

And suddenly he thinks there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's fading fast because the darkness that has always been there with him is tunneling down around him.

**-2-**

Dexter is fourteen years old when Harry tells him that his training is finished. He nods back, both relieved and dissatisfied because this was their time, his-and-Harry's time.

But he puts up with it-Harry is his father after all and if this is what it takes, well then, alright.

That night he leaves the house in the woods early as usual, before the sun even thinks of going down. Deb meets him at the door of the run-down cabin they've claimed as their own.

_She's covered in blood and_

he smiles

So she smiles back.

**-3-**

There is red everywhere on the floor and Dexter is still in the doorway, the shock not quite coming but the part of his brain not ready to process what he is looking at it. The monster in him though, the thing that plays as a blood analysis by day for the police sees every drop of red

_Drip-drip-drip_

lathering the floor in thick, syrupy paste. It is thick, coagulated and he knows it is not fit for use in the body. A hundred little facts filter through his head but he hears nothing of it.

Walking over, through paste of red and insides, he scoots his son away from the scene and a trail of dark ruby follows behind him. Dexter counts away and believes that his son, their son-but his son now, has been alone in the red for two hours at the most.

_and all that time he'd been playing with the man who_

Dexter walks through the paste like sewer water, the smell and slug sharply sour to his senses. Tipping his hand slowly over, he kneels in the blood, ignores the lukewarm water because

_he's never held hope until_

just because that is what you do when you find a body.

The tips of his fingers slide across the edge of her bony, naked shoulder and

_In_

_Out_

_In_

_Out_

She's breathing. Shallow but it's there, breathing.

He is only still a second.

And then he is up, up and up and up and running towards a phone.

Harrison gets picked up on the way to the phone and while he's nearly screaming for an ambulance to the phone after a quick dial of 9-1-1, Dexter slowly seeks every inch of his son, pulls three hairs away that do not belong there, finds a piece of tape to pull the fingerprint than loudly cleans Harrison's body of his mother's blood.

The front door is waiting and open when the EMT's rush in. Deb comes two minutes later, running in shock and scared and she want's to know what's going on.

But Dexter hears nothing of it

_because she's alive and_

He knows that he will never leave her alone again.

**-4-**

Dexter sees the two thin lines the end of her lower left arms slashed in red. The diamond ring on her finger glints lightly, a mocking bow. He wonders why and hates. Because as his son stares up at him, a mirror of twenty-five years earlier, he feels betrayed.

**-5-**

She comes to him at work one day, her blonde hair curled slightly and her shirt a little dressier than normal. Oh, he has an outfit tucked in a drawer somewhere in his office but he pulls her in for the last of it.

Because she

_looks so good against the spotted red_

is alive and beautiful and a reason for him to hurry it up and not get too caught up in the blood.

**-6-**

She had been a cover. At first. Honestly, he hadn't felt anything for her but annoyance for her sticking around an abusive dick And then he got to know her, felt her slide into his life with all that womanly grace he could never understand. Deb doesn't like her at first-she's weak and willowy and Deb thinks the blonde just wants him for his reputation to keep her ex-husband away.

Dexter does not know why he allows her to stay. Why he allows her to live except that he does NOT kill innocent.

But she's not innocent, is she? Not really? Because looming over him as she impales herself, he arches up into her, turns and slams her back in the bed enough to dent the walls.

Rita is

_wild_

_laughing_

_carefree_

Rita is

_taunting him_

_and _

_not pulling back_

_and_

_taking him all the way in _

_and_

Rita is

His.

**-7-**

He sits on the lounge chair at the back near the pool, watching the children laugh and play. Harrison is beginning to walk upright on his own now and is laughing as well, holding out his arms wanting to join his half-siblings in their play. Yes, Astor and Cody have been good to their younger sibling.

He hears a noise, a voice he can't quite make out, and looks over.

Rita.

But she's not there-not really

_and turning his head back around to the children as if nothing went on _

Harrison is no longer laughing, no longer crying. His boy with dark hair and light eyes over a shadow are staring at the air beside his father. The killer swallows because

Dexter Morgan had not been able to see her at first.

They'd kept the house-never sold it but moved on to a place that was the same but not-the-same where their mother would not haunt them. It was a nice place-brick instead of fence though and Dexter was glad he only had to mow the backyard because the front was rock and gravel.

And then the kids have the baby's attention back and it was as if nothing had happened. But Dexter still feels her beside him, warm and watching. She hums in contentment as if she is there in flesh and blood and

_but it was all over the floor and_

_souls should not leave heaven_

_and _

Dexter does not believe she is really there.

But a while later when the mourning family of four go back into the house, there is an imprint left on the pool lounge.

**-8-**

College is like a forest. The green is just non-lead-based paint and the rocks that have replace grass seem sharp and he grins inside when one young jock runs, skids, and shreds his knee on the way down.

But there are too many people and he isn't sure where he is at the moment. All these little flesh bags of blood and evil innocence.

School for the next few years is easy. Read a book, answer a paper, do a project. The hard part is blending in, being one of them, and he knows this is his real test. He finds a place to savor the darkness at a jazz bar. The music isn't bad and the beat is okay but he goes there for the darkness, to hunt with his eyes what his hands won't get.

There's a blonde who sings there sometimes, like a canary, for the sun. He sees her sometimes elsewhere, and it isn't long before he's seeing her more closely, pushed up against walls, her legs around him and her head thrown back in climax. But the monster in him wants blood and he

_wants her_

puts her to the edge of his mind until eight years later. He sees her again. Through all their twisted courtship though she never saw his face in the dark and when she shudders under the gazes of men Rita curls up in herself.

She meets him and marries him and

_he still wants her_

The monster in him is ashamed but this is one instance when the Dark Passenger in side him loses.

**-9A-**

Something about Dexter scares her, when he sits on the couch alone and stares at the television as if he sees beyond it, at something that isn't really there. She's entered the house before, when he was like that, but said nothing. The hair on her neck had stood up and there had been something inside of her that shivered. Quietly, she goes back outside and makes some noise when she comes and when he turns around and gives a smile that must not be used to being there because it's so wiggly.

He's okay though, and she's okay and when her Dad stands over her mother next time, menacingly, Dexter is behind him and pushing him out of the way.

**-9B-**

Dexter doesn't know how to play some games. Oh, he knows there are basketball, and vaguely knows the rules to baseball but he wants so bad for Dex to play ball with him when his own Dad never would, too drunk or too high for anything fun for his son.

And then that man is standing over Momma and Astor and Cody practically

_feels _

knows

when Dexter comes in silently, stalking prey like one of those tigers or lions or big cats at the zoo. And then Dex grabs Dad's hands from behind, twists in some professional way just to wrestle the drunk away from them, out the door, and Cody hopes he

_never sees Dad again_

that Dex will come back because he was nice, and warm and didn't ignore him and Dex meant safety where Dad never did.

**-9C-**

Rita knows she is a bad mother, useless and wrong for keeping her kids anywhere around here but the court said he could have visitation. But she was weary, used to being beaten and knowing when it was just around the corner. All she is doing now is keeping him away from the kids, keeping the drunk away from her babies and then

_dark_

Dexter comes

_yes, oh yes!_

for them

_save me, save me_

and he rescues the princess and her puppies.

Rita knows Dexter doesn't know that she knows that nobody ever sees her ex-husband again. She keeps his absence from her children and gives her new husband a baby of his own. Dexter makes her feel as if nothing can ever hurt her.

**-10-**

_She's dead, dead, dead._

She's dead. De-ad. Dead. He tastes the word on his tongue but it never falls from his lips. It tries to come out again but he just things it. "De-ad."

_No._

It is Harrison who says it with a voice not his own and Dexter jerks away, off balance more than anything because the progeny is just a baby and cannot speak and

"Dexter, wake up. Wake up." Someone is shaking him. "Wake up," coos into him and holds his face gently.

_just_

His eyes snap open and he looks into green eyes dark with worry or concern. He doesn't say a thing, just lays there, immobile for a moment. The scene of red on the bathroom floor and a corpse in the tub in the shape of his wife passes in front of his face.

_just a_

In a move so fast she squeaks he has her up on the wall, his mouth and tongue tracing the curves of her skin on her neck and his hand holding her hard against the wall.

_just a nightmare_

and then he is positioned, then inside of her, rubbing raw against skin and then pumping through boiling fluid-hotter than the luke-warm water around her corpse

_Just. A. Nightmare! _

Rita is just glad Harrison had a warm bottle of milk an hour before and that Astor was visiting her grandmother while Cody was at a sleepover for the weekend because they were loud enough the neighbors could have complained. But she doesn't complain any, just grins widely with her stupefying bliss as her husband nearly steams with the warmth coming off him.

She grins, licks her lips, bends over and takes him for another ride.

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-

Okay, that's that. I just love drabbles, don't you? This all came from a spoiler I saw a bit ago, if you haven't noticed, and took me about two hours to write, so I like to think I did pretty good. Reviews welcome!


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